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Re: 12 week old baby has green poos and fusses at breast

Well, she slept until 6.30! We gave her 60 mls of milk in a bottle and I nursed her in bed for about an hour and then my husband rocked her to sleep. She stirred around 12:30 am but settled before I even had a chance to properly wake up
Hopefully tonight will be similarly easy!
It's so great not to have to pump anymore, I realised now that I may have been impatient when feeding the LO as I knew I had to find 30-40 minutes to pump as well, then sterilise everything, etc.
Now I can properly focus on my baby

Re: 12 week old baby has green poos and fusses at breast

Hi everyone. So it's been a few days now without the evening bottle, fenugreek and pumping but I still have a few questions!
I nurse LO to sleep around 9pm. There was one day when she nursed well and after an hour she was asleep and slept for 5 hours. The next few days were much harder as it would take me until midnight to get her to sleep. She kept falling asleep on the breast and would wake up after 5 minutes... Then she'd wake up after 3-4 hours wanting more food. Is there anything I can do to ensure she eats more efficiently in the evening?
She's also still fussy during the day, especially in the morning. She keeps pulling off the nipple and crying although there's plenty of milk there. Could this be due to a too fast flow?
I'm thinking perhaps it takes more than a few days for my milk supply to stabilise?
Please help, it seems like things are worse now than before (plus my husband and I are getting much less sleep!)

Re: 12 week old baby has green poos and fusses at breast

I'm sorry you've had some rough nights. I think the most important thing to remember is that sleep disruptions are entirely normal for young babies, due to teething, hunger, loneliness, development, etc. You shouldn't expect your child to consistently sleep long stretches (meaning 5-6 hours or more) until she's at least a year old. Now, some babies do consistently sleep long stretches, and that's awesome for mom and dad! My point here is that you shouldn't EXPECT those long stretches. Think of them as a gift from the universe, one which may be taken back at any time. And the gift may vanish no matter how you feed your kid- I have a friend whose baby is exclusively on formula and eating very large bottles during the day, and he still wakes up twice a night to eat.

Night-waking also has nothing to do with the efficiency with which your baby feeds. Babies who are highly efficient nursers will still wake to eat; again, it's developmentally normal for them to do so.

So, here are some things you can do to deal with what's going on:
- Sleep when the baby sleeps. If baby takes a nap during the day, you take a nap with her. Even just closing your eyes for 5 minutes can help a lot.
- Sleep with the baby in very close proximity. Night-waking is much more disruptive when you have to get up out of bed. If baby is sleeping in your bed or in a sidecar crib attached to your bed, you may only need to roll over, nurse, and then go back to sleep. Also, babies who sleep right next to mom are often better sleepers, since they can hear and smell mom all night long, and that eliminates a lot of waking due to loneliness. If you want safe co-sleeping tips, let us know.
- Elevate the head of baby's mattress by placing a pillow under the head of the mattress. Sleeping slightly elevated can help if reflux or gas is a component in the night-waking.
- Swaddle the baby's arms. Sometimes an overenthusiastic startle reflex can wake the baby up.
- Go back to a nightly bottle of pumped milk. It works for a lot of people, and if you want it to be part of your life, that's okay! I would just encourage you to give your new routine a little more time. Maybe things will settle down.

Re: 12 week old baby has green poos and fusses at breast

Hi Mommal, thanks for your reassurance (again!) and tips!
I started co-sleeping and I find it much easier than what I was doing before (getting up and taking LO into the lounge to feed her on the sofa), now I just feed her while we're both half asleep and we fall asleep again! It's a bit of a disruption for my husband so he is now moving to the mattress in the other room - he's a light sleeper and once he wakes up it takes him forever to go back to sleep so we figured it might be the best option. Plus, me and LO will have the whole bed to ourselves!

What I mean when I said she's not feeding efficiently is that she falls asleep on the breast very quickly. She'll suckle well when the breast is full, but towards the end of the day she just suckles for a few minutes and then just nibbles or falls asleep. She only falls asleep for 5 minutes though as she's obviously not full so we try again, and again and again. I spent about 3 hours last night trying to keep her awake enough to feed and she eventually fell asleep.

During the day she's just fussy and pulls away from the breast after a few minutes, crying. I'm not sure whether this is due to milk flowing too fast, too slow or whether she has a sore tummy. When she's like that I usually put her on the other breast and she sometimes settles, but I feel she's never actively sucking on one breast to actually get to the hindmilk and by switching her to the other breast I just exacerbate the 'too much foremilk' problem (gas, sore tummy, green poos). I'm constantly wondering whether she's getting enough, although I think that she's got a good number of wet/dirty nappies per day. Although you ladies said not to worry about green poos, I can't help but think they/too much foremilk cause the fussiness.
I'm going to get her weighed tomorrow and we'll see how much she gained.
I will persevere with no pumping/no bottles for the next few weeks, maybe it just takes time!
I'm also planning to go to my local LLL meeting to see whether there's anything I can improve on regarding the latch, etc.

Re: 12 week old baby has green poos and fusses at breast

I'm glad you found a sleep arrangement that improves your nights! If it makes you and your husband feel better, a lot of couples find that they need to change up their sleep arrangements when there's a new baby in the picture. It's temporary. And it's definitely better than you dragging yourself over to the sofa, which is something which makes me nervous to even think about- it's so easy to fall asleep while night-nursing and the sofa is one of the worst places to sleep with a baby because it's so easy for them to get entrapped in the cushions.

Thanks for explaining more about the sort of feeding efficiency you're looking for. Have you tried switch nursing- that is, switching her from one breast to the other when she starts to nod off? Sometimes that can help wake a baby up. It also might help to try to shift her last nap a little later in the day, so that she's a little more awake when bedtime rolls around and a little more likely to feed well.

Too much foremilk can cause additional fussiness, but most baby fussiness is caused by the condition of being a baby... I know it's hard not to obsess over poop and fussing, but if you can relieve yourself of some of those "it's all my fault" feelings, and just accept that babies are fussy and gassy creatures, I think you'll enjoy this part of motherhood a bit more. You're doing awesome and you should feel really happy and proud of all you're doing!

Re: 12 week old baby has green poos and fusses at breast

Hi Mommal, thanks again!
Last night was a nightmare: LO fell asleep at 10.30pm, woke up at 2.30 and wouldn't fall asleep until 5am, then she woke up again at 6am. I was exhausted...
She's drooling a lot and she's also gnawing on her fists or my knuckles or anything in sight... I read that although the first teeth usually come out around 5 months or 7 months the whole teething process starts earlier and the symptoms might be drooling, restlessness, sleep disruption as well as pulling away from the breast.
My friend recommended giving LO a little baby paracetamol before she goes to sleep - I tried this tonight and I hope we both get a bit more sleep!
I had her weighed today and she gained 280g in the last two weeks. She's now 14 weeks and weighs 6.38kgs

Re: 12 week old baby has green poos and fusses at breast

Hi everyone. It's been almost two weeks since I stopped taking fenugreek and stopped pumping, but I haven't seen any positive changes apart from my LO being easier to get to sleep as she now falls asleep on the boob and sleeps with me in my bed.
But the poos are still green and quite watery and I'm really worried It seems like no matter what I do, the poos are consistently green and I'm sure that they are the reason my LO is so fussy during the day.
I try to make sure she finishes one breast before I put her on the other one, but it doesn't seem to make a difference... Whenever I squeeze my nipple to check the milk coming out, it always seems to be the watery, 'thin' milk, rather than the (I assume) whiter, fattier stuff.
Any more tips for me?

Re: 12 week old baby has green poos and fusses at breast

My second kid had consistently green, and sometimes blood-streaked, poops for months. She was generally quite a happy baby and always a very healthy one. My pediatrician was never concerned, nor did she ask my to do any dietary changes. My point being that green poops are just part of the picture. Green poops in a happy, healthy, normal baby- those can be considered normal. But if a baby is not gaining weight at a normal rate, or has symptoms of severe distress or illness- THEN it's time to worry about poop color, because in that case the poop color is probably a symptom of a larger and more troublesome issue.

So, how is baby doing aside from poop color and aside from fussiness? Is she gaining weight? Is she showing any symptoms of allergy (e.g. eczema, hives, a red ring around her anus)? Is she developing as expected? Is she generally nursing happily, or is she still being very fussy? If she's fussy, can you describe the behavior that you're seeing?

A note about milk color: human milk is generally more "thin" looking than cow's milk. It can vary in color, but Is often bluish-white. The only time you really can see cream is when you allow expressed milk to sit in the fridge for a while- then the cream will separate out and float on top of the milk.

Re: 12 week old baby has green poos and fusses at breast

Originally Posted by @llli*lllmeg

Did you ever try eliminating dairy or soy or anything else from your diet?

can you describe what happens with your baby during the day? And baby is how old now?

I haven't tried eliminating anything yet, no. My LO had yellow poos in the beginning, up until she was 3-4 weeks old. That's the time I was convinced I didn't have enough milk so I started trying different things to increase production: mainly drinking herbal lactation teas, taking fenugreek (2 x capsules 3 times a day) and pumping to have milk for the evening.
Do food intolerances develop over time? My thinking is, if my LO was affected by something I've been eating then she would have had green poos from the beginning, right? I haven't changed my diet and I'm trying to eat everything.

The LO is now 3 months and 11 days. She seems to eat roughly every hour (I'm saying roughly because I don't really look at the clock much during the day) and in between feedings she's quite a happy baby, smiles, coos and gurgles. What concerns me is that she often pulls off the breast and starts crying and it's hard to latch her on again as she pulls away again. If that happens I try to get her upright and sometimes this results in a big burp and I can latch her on again. Sometimes she pulls away and cries until she finally does a poo (so she's probably crying because she finds it hard/painful to make a poo?). Sometimes there is no reason and only carrying her for a few minutes around the house calms her down.

I know that baby poos tend to be quite loose, but LO's are often quite watery. I'm not really sure whether this is a cause for concern or not?

I have to say I'm quite confused when it comes to switching baby from breast to breast or offering the other breast.
All sources say: wait until baby finishes one breast and then switch to the other one, but how am I to judge when she is truly finished? I know I should not do block feeding because that's used to actually decrease the amount of milk produced but at the same time I don't want to switch LO from breast to breast too often as I fear she'll then get more foremilk and not enough hindmilk.
I often have a feeling that LO gets full quickly on too much foremilk and she's not interested in eating more (but I can see that there's still milk there and it's whiter, less translucent than the milk that comes out of the breast at the beginning of the feed). Then, because foremilk doesn't keep LO full for long she is hungry again, so I offer her the same breast she was on before - is that the right strategy?

I'm sorry this is so chaotic, I'm trying to describe it as best I can, but it's so confusing